Blucora

Infospace, Inc. was an American company that offered private label search engine, online directory, and provider of metadata feeds. The company's flagship metasearch site was Dogpile and its other notable consumer brands were WebCrawler and MetaCrawler. After a 2012 rename to Blucora, the InfoSpace business unit was sold to data management company OpenMail. History The company was founded in March 1996 by Naveen Jain after he left Microsoft. The company started with six employees, and Jain served as CEO until 2000. InfoSpace provided content and services, such as phone directories, maps, games and information on the stock market, to websites and mobile device manufacturers. The company grew at low cost without funding using co-branding strategies. Rather than try to get traffic to an InfoSpace website, sites like Lycos, Excite and Playboy embedded InfoSpace's features and content into their site and added an InfoSpace icon to it. InfoSpace then earned money by taking a small percentage of licensing, subscription or advertising fees. On December 15, 1998, InfoSpace went public under the ticker INSP, raising $75 million in the offering. By April 2000, InfoSpace was working with 1,500 websites, 60 content providers and 20 telecommunications companies. InfoSpace was praised by Wall Street analysts and at its peak its market cap was $31 billion. It became the largest internet business in the American Northwest. InfoSpace may have contributed to the inflated expectations in internet companies during the height of the dot-com bubble. In July 2000, InfoSpace acquired Go2Net. After the merger, Go2Net CEO Russell Horowitz became president of InfoSpace. The same year, InfoSpace used a controversial accounting method to report $46 million in profits when in fact it had lost $282 million. Company executives skirted SEC trading restrictions to sell large blocks of their personal stock. Jain resumed the role of CEO in 2001, but was soon forced out by InfoSpace's board in December 2002. By June 2002, the company's stock price, which reached $1,305 in March 2000, had dropped sharply to $2.67.